It May Take a Little Bit of Time

At Financial Times John Paul Rathbone and Steff Chávez raise a point I’ve been mentioning for some time. It’s easier to say “give the Ukrainians what they need” than it may be to do it:

In May, when Washington ordered 1,300 Stinger anti-air missiles to replace those sent to Ukraine, the chief executive of Raytheon, the defence company that makes them, replied: “It’s going to take us a little bit of time.”

Paris, meanwhile, has sent 18 Caesar howitzers to Kyiv — a quarter of its total stock of the high-tech artillery — but it will take French company Nexter around 18 months to make new ones.

Their conclusion?

Military experts have been scouring the Ukraine conflict for insights about the nature of modern war. Lesson “number one” so far is the importance of maintaining basic stockpiles, said Jack Watling, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank.

“This isn’t new, but it’s something we have been determined to ignore for a very long time,” Watling told a warfare podcast. “Cheap munitions that you can use at scale are absolutely critical . . . [The west needs] to be much more disciplined about not always chasing the exquisite but instead understanding how the exquisite enables the fairly dull and mundane.”

I would say that “lesson number one” should be don’t delegate the production of basic munitions or the materials or equipment needed to make more to prospective adversaries but maybe that’s just me.